I combine scholarship on girlhood and the magical shōjo genre to examine the trend of princesses with magical power in popular contemporary animated fairy tale films, using Walt Disney Animated Studio’s Tangled (Greno and Howard, 2010) and Studio Ghibli’s The Tale of the Princess Kaguya (Takahata, 2013) as case studies. While there has been some work on magical objects and the use of portals as agents of transformation in relation to fairy tale and literary fantasy heroines, there is more limited study on their use of innate, wieldable magical power as tools of agency. In this paper, I concentrate on magical power in relation to the figure of the princess through what I call magical agency, which I define as agency provided to a person through their own use of magic, particularly wieldable magical power. In the last decade, there has been an increasing trend in princesses who have wieldable magical power in popular fairy tale films, most notably Elsa from Disney’s Frozen (Buck and Lee, 2013). Despite being framed through fantastic tales, the princess is more often placed as adjacent to magical power or simply as girls in a magical world.
The princess is a figure who has featured prominently in fairy tales for centuries, but has been popularised in fairy tale animation through the films of the Walt Disney Animated Studio.
